* Arthur Torrey <[email protected]> [2020-11-01 23:04]: > I agree with RMS about the badness of patents and the desirability > of copyleft (which REQUIRES copyRIGHT to work!) but as far as I am > concerned, trademarks are generally a good thing and should be > protected...
When software author prevents people to modify software and issue modified software under original name that IS practical obstacle to share software. It imposes expenses, efforts and waste of time. It is not common in software sharing. And by opinion of myself and other people, not everybody, it is obstacle to freedom. By principle I should be able to modify software AS I WISH, right? When there is such clause that I cannot name software as I wish, I am thus not free. So for me, independent of other people' opinion, such trademark clause is making software non-free, as it forces me to modify the command name, or name of software prior to distribution. Obstacles like that are popularly made by Mozilla or by Rust. For that reason many GNU/Linux distributions decided to fork Firefox and change its names. That is why we have "Iceweasel". It is great obstacle to modify 2809 occurences of the term "rust" in Rust programming language. Language was not made in a form of a template with some variable @@TRADEMARK@@ so that such can easily by replaced by changing it in Makefile: TRADEMARK=My-Must-Language Imagine if `gawk' is trademark (maybe it is) and that copyright holder also requires that modification to gawk must change the name of the gawk due to reason that gawk is a trademark. That would automatically break all the other scripts depending on gawk. Did I get freedom really to modify software as I wish? No, I did not. I have to modify the software HOW THEY WISH, as I am forced to change the trademark word to another one. And as developer I may get the same obstructive idea to prevent others using my trademark when I convey software to them. It becomes mess. It is NOT ALIGNED with four freedoms! Imagine if GNU or trademark holder would start imposing trademark on people who innocently improve `gnumeric' or `gnucash' and call it `gnumeric-improved' or `gnucash-ng'. What would then happen? Would we making friends this way? Would we be helping people to share software or putting attention how to sue them for some money? Such trademark policies on software names may not hold water in many countries including in the US. One cannot just relinquish the trademark use by giving it to users as "command name" and later claim it is trademark. It is arguable by law in the US and by law in other countries. That is "losing trademark control". Program was released with intention to be used by many people and people would automatically speak about command name in computing. It is questionable which court would give right to trademark holder. Because both Mozilla and Rust KNOW THE ABOVE statement, that is why they are making it very clear upfront before somebody starts doing it. If they would not make it very clear they would not have any legal chance in court. Companies as Mozilla confuse users, they impose restrictions that are not even meant to be by the trademark law and people believe it, and also try to comply to it. Trademark law is not planetary and does not affect automatically users in other countries just as copyright laws are not same in various countries. Imposing such "trademark use" policies in the US is futile if developers from other country wish to use the trademark completely legally in their jurisdiction. Imposing planetary "trademark policies" on software use or users or commercial companies is simply not viable. For free software developers: 1. Do not use your trademark within or on your software. Use it on your website, use it on business cards, letters, in your communication or marketing. Do not make system commands by using your trademarks. If you do, relinquish your rights to users. Do not impose that modifications of software require change of name of the software. Separate your business trademark from software you are producing. If your company is called Python, then use trademark for sales of your programming language or donations, whatever, but do not call your programmin language same as your trademark. In other worsd, do not trap users and don't make us problems. 2. If you use your trademarks on free software, then please use them to give freedom by using trademark law, just in the same sense as GPL is used to give freedom. In other sense make it tradeleft similarly as copyleft. There is something called collective trademark and certification mark in United States. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_trade_mark and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Certification_mark thus A collective trademark, collective trade mark, or collective mark is a trademark owned by an organization (such as an association), used by its members to identify themselves with a level of quality or accuracy, geographical origin, or other characteristics set by the organization. Certification marks differ from collective trade marks. Collective trade marks may be used by particular members of the organization that owns them, while certification marks are the only evidence of the existence of follow-up agreements between manufacturers and nationally accredited testing and certification organizations. Now, proposals for GPL 3 improvements: - make software authors unable to make obstacles by imposing change of name of software when software is modified, as that is against four freedoms. - or less desirable IMHO, automatically certify every receiver of software and give them rights to use the trademark as certification trademark: (PUT YOUR TRADEMARK) free software user. GPL and copyrights are very complex. Huge collection of DMCA notices on Github prove that people get very confused, as developers in first place are programmers and not attorneys. Not even attorney would ever understand the GPL in the same day, it would probably require several days or weeks of verification to understand it. Using trademarks on top of GPL to impose obstacles to users is unjust as it goes straight against the four freedoms to modify as I wish, and not to modify as you wish. Example: https://www.python.org/psf/trademarks/ > We do not want these trademarks to be used: to refer to any other > programming language Comment: this in large was never a problem in free software world. When something is not a problem one does not need to find solutions for that. > As such, stating accurately that software is written in the Python > programming language, that it is compatible with the Python > programming language, or that it contains the Python programming > language, is always allowed If I make modification to Python and make things incompatible to original Python, I should not use "Python" as term? WTF? Imagine if LISP is trademark, we made so many incompatibilities with original LISP in variety of implementations that we would now all be in trouble for trademark reasons. That does not fly. What if C programming language was protected as trademark from its inception? When making free software programming language, or specification do not bundle it with whatever nasty trademark obstacles. > Any commercial use of the PSF trademarks in product or company names > must be approved first by the PSF. Well guess what? Modifying Python sources and putting it on a public server is already "commercial use of trademark". They call it "commercial" but mix the terminology as commercial does not imply money involved. Now if innocent developer have modified Python sources and still call it Python is to denounced or sued, because person did not get "approval" to use "Python" and maybe because person did not make the new version compatible with the original version. That is AGAINST four freedoms to modify software as ONE WISH. "For mobile apps and other software products, the launch of the app is typically considered use in commerce. Beta testing may or may not be considered sufficient depending on the extent of the testing." from https://www.upcounsel.com/trademark-use-in-commerce#use-in-commerce-for-software Jean _______________________________________________ libreplanet-discuss mailing list [email protected] https://lists.libreplanet.org/mailman/listinfo/libreplanet-discuss
